Q&A With Graham Hawkes, the Man Who Built the Deep Flight Challenger Submersible

Earlier this week, billionaire entrepreneur and adventurer Richard Branson announced his plans to go to the deepest parts of the ocean—37,000 feet down—in the one-man submersible Deep Flight Challenger. But the man behind the Deep Flight Challenger is Graham Hawkes, who initially designed the craft for Steve Fossett before Fossett passed away in 2007. Hawkes tells PM why flying though the water is just like flying through the air, why "Earth" is a stupid name for the planet and what is the next frontier once you've visited the bottom of the sea.

What's different about the submersibles you've been designing?

I've built 60 or so normal submersibles, which we call sinkers. They work by Archimedes' principle of weight and water displacement. They go down heavy. They literally fall down and then they drop weights to float back up.

What we're building now, the Super Falcon, is buoyant and very simple. It works on the principle used by the Wright brothers for flightit has wings. It's is capable of going down to the bottom in under two hours, and then performing a 10-kilometer overflight and exploration. It should have more than a 10-kilometer range on the bottom. It's like the difference between ballooning and flying.

Challenger is a hybrid. The craft we're now building uses pure underwater flight. Challenger was designed in the early 2000s so it actually does go down with weight, but once it's on the bottom it drops its first series of weights, and then it uses the wings and the principles of flight to do a controlled exploration of the bottom.

Is underwater flying different from flying in the air?

We've recently put some very skilled pilots in the Super Falcon, including active duty Navy test pilots. And to be honest, those pilots just take control immediately. A skilled pilot requires almost no training.

Did you design it to look like an airplane?

I designed it using mathematical and engineering principles. It turns out that physics guides the solution, and that solution looks exactly like an airplane.

We've gone through four generations of submersibles now. The first generation was called Deep Flight 1, and that's 70 percent airplane and 30 percent submarine. As we've refined the design, we've ended up with what looks exactly like an airplane. If I'd just designed it to look like an airplane from day one, we could have gotten there much quicker.

So it's exactly like an airplane?

It has the layout of an aircraft. It has wings, but one difference is the lift section on those wings is upside down. Because we want to go down, not up. An aircraft uses it's wings to lift up. These craft want to float upwards, so the wings are needed to pull them down.

What's the design of Deep Flight Challenger?

It's about 24 feet long, with a 10-foot wingspan. It's designed for 16,000 pounds [of pressure] per square inch. The pressure hull is made of a custom-designed carbon fiber, with very thick walls. Inside, we provide an artificial atmosphere. The pilot is not subjected to any pressure differences whatsoever. There's a big window in the front that's covered by a Plexiglas streamline canopy. The deep water typically is clear, so there will be lots to see. And it doesn't look like it, but the inside is actually a comfortable space.

What were the main design challenges?

To get the weight down to where we could use small mother-ships. This is not a submarinesubmarines are autonomous so they can leave port and travel around. A submersible [like Deep Flight Challenger] needs to be carried by a mother-ship and launched above its dive site, then recovered later. The cost of that mother-ship is what really drives any submersible program.

Typical deep submersiblesthere are only five in the world and they only go about half as deep as the Deep Flight Challengerweigh about 60,000 pounds. This weights 8,000 pounds. That's incredibly important because if we weighed 80,000 pounds we'd need a monstrous mother-ship, and the cost of that is just enormous.

Another challenge was dealing with the pressure. The engineering of the pressure hull wasn't easy. There were just challenges every which way you look. We solved the issues of flight over several generations of craft over a 15-year development period.

How do you make these safeor, as safe as possible?

Well, Deep Flight Challenger was designed for the purpose initially proposed by Steve Fossettthe man who went around the world in balloons, setting scores of tremendous records, who unfortunately was killed in a plane crash just before we finished this project. So the answer is that this is a record-breaking machine. Think of a race car that's going to set a new land speed record. It's not something that you'd use as a taxi or let just anybody drive.

It does have risk. It has much higher risk than other submersibles we would build for private users. This submersible goes twice as deep as anything else. It's about one-tenth the weight and it's got 10 times the exploring range. You can't make that kind of leap without exotic materials and exotic design. So there is risk there, and you control that with a strict agreement on who can use it. This was designed to be used just with myself as a test pilot.

So you're okay with that risk?

I'm personally okay with that, I have a lot of experience. If I went down and it cracked up around me, then I'd say "That was my fault," and I'd take the consequences. My family wouldn't be very happy of course.

What's next for you?

Challenger is a third generation design. There is later generation called Super Falcon, which doesn't go anywhere near as deep, but it's faster and agile, and that's the one I'm looking forward to exploring with. My wife and I are about to take the Super Falcon on an exploration of the Gulf of Aqaba [on the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula], and we expect to finds all kinds of new animals. You can have encounters with big animals, and it's very very cool.

What does it feel like flying a Super Falcon?

It's beautiful, its gentle, it's phenomenal. I've taken my children down. They come up, eyes wide, grinning from ear-to-ear. Same thing with experienced jet pilots we've taken down. Every time we dive down it's like we're experiencing a different planet. The ocean is this beautiful, unexplored place. Why on Earth everyone isn't down there I don't know. The crazy thing is we live on an ocean planetnobody gets that yet. Earth is a really stupid name for this planet.

Can other people get that experience?

My wife and I are trying to start a program called VIP in the Sea. We want to take people down who can make a differencewriters, poets, artists.

Up until Challenger, the Holy Grail was to get one man to the bottom of the planet. We've built that and now we're moving on. Instead of getting one person down 37,000 feet, now the thing to do would be to get 37,000 people down one foot. That's what we're hell-bent on trying to do.